Shooting Down Pictures

For this video essay, I’m especially pleased to have as guest commentator someone who I’ve known for almost as long as I’ve been discussing movies on the internet.   Back when I was a frequent visitor on the iMDb Classic Film board, I considered Christianne Benedict - known there as Chris-435 – to be one of the most readable and down-to-earth participants around.  Chris’ enthusiasm for movies really comes through in her writing, especially when it comes to horror.  You can find many of Chris’ writings at krelllabs.blogspot.com

If you like this video, please rate it!

screened December 22 2008 on 16mm at the MoMA Media Study Center

TSPDT rank #677 IMDb

In some ways, Stan Brakhage’s 4-plus hour magnum opus isn’t so much an epic of experimental cinema as the most intensely comprehensive horror movie that hardly anyone has seen. It’s a horror of metaphysical proportions: its five-part structure takes universal elements of existence and renders them into a symphony of shock visuals inducing a state of alienated perception.  Brakhage’s exhaustive vision summons a bracing repertoire of filming and editing techniques, including whip pans, color tints, lens distortions, and scratched and painted frames. Assaulting and enthralling, this technique calls attention to the celluloid medium existing almost independently of the real world, and impels an ethos of seeing for seeing’s sake.

The Prelude launches a barrage of images of the natural world chopped and decontextualized into a stream of organic gibberish. It’s a ruthless effort to deprogram viewers from their anchoring in narrative and divorce vision from cognition, replacing meaning with the sheer sensory power of image-in-itself.  It’s somewhat puzzling that he follows this brazen opening with Part I, which teases a basic narrative of Brakhage arduously scaling a snowy mountain, suggesting a symbolic struggle of everyday life. Part II returns to a more abstract representation, intercutting shots of an infant with flashes of the world around it: the bewilderment of childhood, naked and exposed to a fearsomely vast universe.

Part III, the most wildly sensual section, can stand on its own as one of the longest and strangest sexual acts ever committed to celluloid. Sex is conveyed not through literal intercourse but through lingering close-ups of skin and hair, lurid orange and blue tinted glimpses of naked flesh writhing in fluid, and nauseating shots of guts being torn apart, conveying both a physical and emotional rending of self in the throes of erotic passion.  It’s charged with both excitement and dread, horrified and inflamed by sex as an act of both love and violence.

Part IV seems to end over and over in a relentless loop, repeatedly showing Brakhage hacking away at a tree with an ax, existence as a restless cycle of debilitation slowly winding down to death, while flashing to distorted shots of body parts, landscapes and scratched and painted celluloid. In the end, there is only the work as a remnant of life’s toil and suffering, whose value amounts to nothing more than fiery embers eagerly consuming its own existence.

Want to go deeper?

Continue Reading »

Special thanks to Preston Miller, director of Jones, for his fastidious commentary and contributions to these video essays.  Expect one more in the coming days, edited by Preston and featuring an exclusive interview with Soumitra Chatterjee, star of the film.

Introduction to the film:

Scene analysis – “The Memory Game:”

Mike D’Angelo is a film critic for Esquire, writer for Las Vegas Weekly, and proprietor of The Man Who Viewed Too Much.

Mike D’Angelo is a film critic for Esquire, writer for Las Vegas Weekly, and proprietor of The Man Who Viewed Too Much.

Rate this video on YouTube

Vadim Rizov is a contributor to The Village Voice, The House Next Door and Nerve, and co-host of the Lichman and Rizov “Live” at Grassroots Tavern podcasts.

Karina Longworth is the editor of SpoutBlog. Her writing has also appeared in FILMMAKER Magazine, The Huffington Post, Netscape, NewTeeVee, The Raw Story and TV Squad.

Transcript after the break Continue Reading »

Special thanks to C. Mason Wells, co-writer of LOL, contributor to The Onion and promotions coordinator for the IFC Center for his many insights that contributed to this video essay. This was a film that left me so amazed that I was actually intimidated to offer any substantial analysis, knowing it wouldn’t sufficiently account for my enthusiasm, so I owe Chris a lot for being able to articulate much of what’s great about this movie.

Special thanks to Dan Callahan of The House Next Door, Slant Magazine and Bright Lights Film Journal for his many insights – and for the tweak of Atonement to give this film some contemporary relevance (as well as an excuse to show a Keira Knightley sex scene).

Apologies for the murky video quality – it’s taken from a television broadcast recorded on a VHS that Dan has owned since he was a teenager! Perhaps this is cause to petition for a proper Region 1 DVD release…